With the increasingly global nature of communications, teleconferencing has become a popular method of facilitating meetings between individuals in remote locations. For example, teleconference participants may dial-in to a conference bridge using a communication terminal such as a mobile phone or a speakerphone device. In typical teleconferences, participants located at the same location may use a communication system that includes a microphone and speaker combination. However, some participants may prefer to use their own communication terminals even if they are in the same room as other participants. The use of multiple audio sensors (e.g., microphones) within the same room may create audio processing issues such as feedback and other anomalies.
In current systems, if users at the same location or common acoustic space dial-in using individual terminals, there is no way to compensate for this organization of terminals in the downstream signals sent to each terminal. Thus, users will often hear not only the other participants in the teleconference but also themselves. Such feedback may create confusion and create significant hurdles in facilitating and conducting teleconferences. Additionally, current teleconferencing systems and methods often do not compensate for changes in a terminal and/or user's location. For example, if a user moves from a room with other teleconference participants (e.g., a common acoustic space) to another location, the teleconference system is often unaware of this environmental change. As such, audio mixing might not properly compensate for this relocation or switch. Still further, the activation of certain functions on a terminal during a teleconference may be rendered ineffective if other terminals in the same room also do not activate the same function. One example of such a function is mute. In a teleconference environment where two users and two terminals are situated in the same location, merely muting one of the two terminals might not be sufficient to hide the audio from the corresponding user. Accordingly, methods and systems for improving audio mixing to compensate for various teleconferencing configurations are needed.